Accused Spammer Says Microsoft Is Wrong

Published 8:00 pm, Tuesday, June 24, 2003

A British man accused by Microsoft Corp. of sending offensive spam e-mails to its customers said Wednesday it is a case of mistaken identity.

Simon Grainger, of Merseyside, northern England, said he is one of those named in 15 lawsuits Microsoft filed last week accusing defendants of collectively flooding its systems and customers with more than 2 billion deceptive unsolicited e-mail messages.

Grainger told the British Broadcasting Corp. he received a writ on June 17 from the U.S.-based corporation, alleging that he was a spammer and had been harvesting e-mail addresses from its MSN site.

But the 43-year-old telecommunications engineer said the three Web sites he owns are used for his teenage daughter's home page and for a local flying club, not for spamming. He believes he was targeted because a domain name he bought last year may have been used in spam attacks by a previous owner.

"When I activated it, it was suddenly inundated with spam _ and I took it off-line," he told the BBC.

In a release about the lawsuit, the company accused Grainger of "issu(ing a) large volume of 'attacks' against Microsoft servers in an attempt to confirm the validity of more than 3 million computer-generated e-mail addresses, in effect harvesting legitimate e-mail addresses for suspected future spam distribution and/or resale."

Microsoft was confident in suing Grainger and the other defendants in its 15 lawsuits, said Tim Cranton, senior corporate attorney for Microsoft. But he conceded that there may be new evidence that emerges and the company is "open to looking at that information and considering it."

Microsoft's original statement about the case referred to defendants in Britain only as "John Doe." Cranton said the company did not want to name the individuals until they were certain they had been served with the complaints.